Ettore Scola’s “A Special Day” – a special movie indeed. A must-watch for those who believe movies are windows to lived and living experiences.

Pauline Kael, one of the finest film critics of my generation, never minced words about what she felt. She was a revered critic of her time. Directors and actors eagerly awaited her reviews. Her columns could make or break a film at the box office. Like any good writer, there are many quotable quotes from her work, but the one I like most is this: “Trash has given us an appetite for art.” This statement may strike some as condescending, but one cannot escape the feeling that Kael’s observation is absolutely spot on. “Trash” may perhaps be a harsh word to describe it, but there is no doubt that most of what goes on in the name of art is definitely mediocre. We latch on to artistic works that are slightly more uplifting than the rest because there is so much trash around. On a positive note, having so much mediocrity around may not be a bad thing after all. It keeps us on our intellectual and aesthetic toes. With so much to choose and experience from, we can independently discern which ones make the cut and which do not. Think about it: If every piece of art we experience is as good and soulfully evocative as a Mona Lisa painting, Proust’s novel, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a Tennessee Williams play, or a Robert Bresson movie, we may quickly become insensitive to great art. It is only against darkness that light shines; against evil, good prevails; against enough bad art, good ones can keep us excited. The ying and the yang. Because great works of art are rare and happen to flower once in a while among oceans of mediocrity, we don’t mind putting up with all the stuff that assails our senses day in and day out (especially cinema. Why else would we mindlessly flip through Netflix or Prime endlessly during our free time? if not with the hope that the platform will throw up something good). We are glad that there is a lot of mediocre art rather than no art at all. It is better for a nation to expend one’s energy making art ( good or bad, it doesn’t matter) than war. Also, we are glad that In the last few decades, the democratization of artistic tools and techniques ( well, Generative AI to be included as well) has liberated artists from the shackles of money, space, and opportunities that had bound artists in the past. This has led to an explosion of art everywhere – which is good, no doubt; but it also brings with it the matter of separating the wheat from the chaff. Inundated by mediocrity, we desperately seek to find at least a few artistic expressions that make the entire universe of art meaningful and worthwhile. The movie I am about to review next belongs to the category of great art.

Recently, on the Criterion channel, I watched ‘A Special Day,’ an Italian movie featuring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in lead roles and directed by Ettore Scola. This movie has been in my queue for at least a year or more, and numerous times in the past, I have overlooked this film, not for any particular reason, but just that I wasn’t locked in mentally to watch the movie. On this particular day, a few weeks ago, I distinctly remember that after nearly an hour of browsing other channels and not finding anything that triggered my interest, I finally decided to pick something from my queue from Criterion. My eyes fell on A special day. This time around, however, I decided to go ahead and hit the “begin play” button. And thank God I did so. I couldn’t have made a better decision than that. A special day was one of the finest films I have ever seen. I’m not known for saying this about too many films, but this movie experience has raised the bar for me on what one can achieve through the medium of films. The direction was master class, each frame carefully composed, each sliver of light and shade accentuating an emotion or an action, and not a segment of the screen without deep meaning or significance. I cannot praise enough the quality of Sophia’s and Marcello’s performances, especially Marcello’s – who has played a role so different from his usual manly image on screen. There wasn’t an expression or a gesture that was out of place from both actors. If Stanilavski, the Russian master who invented the art of “method” acting, had been alive, he would have gladly died at the altar of such a performance. Such perfection and realism. If young actors need to understand what acting means, Sophia and Marcello’s art in this movie should be on their list. So meticulous, well-prepared, and clinically executed were their portrayals of Antonietta and Gabriele – the two principal protagonists of the drama.

The story happens on a single day, with a deceptively simple plot – if we wish to call the story a plot at all. The dram is set on May 6th, 1938, a historically significant day, when Adolf Hitler and his entourage, including his chiefs of staff, Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop, were in Rome as part of a state visit to meet Benito Mussolini, Il Duce. The two dictators would go on to form the “Axis” alliance against the allied forces, an alliance in which Hitler would surreptitiously use Mussolini as a pawn for his territorial ambitions. It is important to understand the life and times in Fascist Italy to appreciate the movie better. It was a period of pervasive and regimented control by the State. It was an era when the state’s tentacles reached virtually every corner of personal and public life, suppressing every whiff of dissent or diversity across society. Dictatorships, as we know, survive by enforcing uniform codes across the state. This is a symptom of their rule and a sign of insecurity as well. Mussolini himself was a short, bulky man, but he had grandiose visions of transforming Italy into the equivalent of a modern Roman Empire. And to achieve that ideal, propaganda was the instrument he used. The news was the drumbeat to which daily life marched. Messages blared out incessantly from radios, and newspapers were filled with messages regulating all aspects of one’s life. Everywhere, banners fluttered in the air praising Mussolini and his role in recasting the destiny of Italy. It is not hard to imagine that an individual in such a society has no value except as a mute instrument of the state. The roles of the sexes and their sexual orientation were clearly delineated. The family structure was rigorously patriarchal ( a point that is sensitively brought out in the movie). Dictatorial regimes know the value of training the young. The Fascist Youth Organization, the young wing of the state, swelled with young Italians of impressionable ages. Boys and girls were systematically groomed to become obedient citizens and soldiers, ready at a moment’s notice to pledge their loyalty or sacrifice their lives to the State. However, not all Italians acquiesced with Mussolini’s regime. An undercurrent of dissent, unease, and questions circulated. People who internally questioned the state of affairs – a minority, of course – realized that living under Mussolini demanded a theatrical performance of them. To survive the surveillance of the secret police, they had to regulate their lives according to a doctored script that demanded nothing less than unconditional conformity on the one hand and exuberant participation in the fascist narrative on the other. It was a time when it was difficult to reconcile what one truly felt and believed with what they were expected to follow. And the rumblings of the war gathering momentum across the borders couldn’t be ignored either. Mussolini’s alignment with Germany, though celebrated as a great political achievement by the propagandists, was questioned by those who cared to look at the bigger picture. The heightened excitement in Rome caused by Hitler’s visit seemed to these select men and women like a flame that was burning exceptionally bright before being extinguished soon. They deeply felt the premonition of an imminent downfall hanging over the fascist regime like a dark cloud.

It is against this background that director Scola decided to place his movie. The first six minutes or so of the film shows the official, edited footage of Hitler’s visit from the archives. There are no introductions, no outside commentary, just black-and-white images of the dwarfish Duce and preening Hitler, along with his trusted lieutenants, going around Rome in an open car, making heroic speeches at historic locations and receiving the guard of honor from various battalions to the cries and adulations of thousands of people who thronged the road and open spaces waving the Italian flag and singing Giovinezza”  – the official anthem of National fascist regime. Six minutes of pure ecstatic propaganda is followed by the first shot of the building complex in which the story of two people is about to unfold. The camera slowly zooms to Antonietta’s apartment, played by Sophia Loren. She is the mother of six children. In a four-minute sequence, Antonniette walks into different rooms, waking her children one after the other and then finally her husband Emmanuelle – a typical Fascist male chauvinist man who believes that wives are chattels and nothing more. While waking up the family, she also tidies up her home – checking out the bathtubs for water, rearranging towels, laying our uniforms – and gives out instructions to each of the children to get ready. It is a sequence of exquisite composition and beauty. In an interview, Sophia Loren explained that Scola shot the entire sequence in one go with a camera in each room, and she had to move from one room to another, altering her tone, movements, and gestures without losing continuity. It is one of the most powerful frame compositions I have seen in movies. By the end of four minutes, we are introduced to the members of the household and the emotional equations that govern them. Soon after, the entire family leaves home to participate in the State rallies. Not just Antonietta’s but the entire building complex empties out in one boisterous and noisy sequence, with men and women dressed in formal uniforms with booted feet romping on the hard concrete pathways leading out of the building. There is something haunting about this sequence. As if life itself is emptied out and in its place, an existential silence creeps in to raise uncomfortable questions. Pasqualino De Santis’s brilliant cinematography in muted tones hovers over the mass movement of men, women, and children as they move through the labyrinthine staircases and undifferentiated blocks of the building. Each apartment looks exactly the same as the others, and people pour out of them like water gushing out from a dam in standard state-issued uniforms. They are excited to be part of the historic rallies. The building itself is symbolic of the types of lives people lead within its walls. Compartmentalized, uniform, and sleep-walking.

Only Gabrielle, Antonietta, and an old grumpy lady warden – a fascist supporter – remain in the complex. For the rest of the film, only these three characters will appear on the screen: the Warden a couple of times perhaps, but for the most part, it is Antonietta and Gabrielle who will, between them, enact the brilliant drama. The character of Gabrielle, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is that of a State radio broadcaster who has lost his job because he is gay. He lives in the apartment diametrically opposite to Antonietta’s. All that Antonietta can initially see of his home is the window. In his first shot, Gabrielle has a weary look on his face and is seen frantically writing and stacking letters on the table and periodically eyeing a loaded gun beside him. It is apparent he is contemplating suicide. We will know later that he is awaiting deportation to Sardinia, which is where political dissidents and those who didn’t tow the state policies were taken as their final destination. Gabrielle’s home is filled with books and papers. He is introduced as an intellectual who has resigned himself to his fate, knowing he has no way out of this stranglehold of the fascist regime.

The circumstance of Antoinette’s and Gabrielle’s chance encounter is not very consequential to the story, although Antonietta’s pet mynah plays a role in the meeting. The flowering of a beautiful and ephemeral relationship between two sensitive individuals who are lost and marginalized in their own way – one for what she is as a woman and wife in Fascist Italy, and the other for who he is as a person in a regime that considers him an aberration – forms the essence and substance of the film. There are no exaggerated histrionics or stereotypical reactions in these character portrayals, but a collection, no – a rich compendium, a worthy study of small gestures, unspoken silences, tremulous and unfulfilled longings fill the screen. We see ourselves in the characters, their pain, their introspection, and their love. Antonietta and Gabrielle both know all they have is that day, an unexpected but quiet day for themselves to be themselves, when everyone else is out cheering their leaders. They know, too – very soon, this will end; folks will return home for Antonietta, and the police will knock at Gabrielle’s doors. These exquisite moments of intellectual, emotional, and physical intimacy between them can never again be recaptured in the din and roar of social necessities that will suck them back. Yet this day, this special day has healed their souls. Nothing else matters.

Sophia Loren and Marcello present their characters as they ought to be: simple, troubled, sensitive, and compassionate, without any star-coated embellishments. Towards the middle of the movie, Gabrielle and Antonietta get physical, not as a contrived act of passion but as the natural consummation of a ripened intimacy between two people who have found a lot in common with each other. This must be one of the most aesthetically shot sexual encounters in movies. Marcello, a gay man, gives into Antonietta’s embrace. After they are done, he tells her, ” It was good, but I still have no feelings.” – an honest revelation of a man who cannot transcend his biology and, at the same time, couldn’t say no to a person who needed his warmth and completion. It is one of those rare intimate moments you will ever see on screen that can tear you up. Sophia admitted in her interview that it was a difficult scene to perform, especially for Marcello, because it was against his popular image. We often talk about on-screen chemistry in movies. Here in this movie, you will see what that really means. Two great actors who have known each other for decades and have acted together since the 1950s, giving themselves completely to the demands of the character. That is true chemistry between actors.

The movie doesn’t have a happy ending in the sense that Gabrielle gets taken away for deportation, and Antonietta returns to her routine. But we sense a triumph of the individual spirit over circumstances. Antonietta will never again feel the same about herself or the political situation. Gabrielle’s passive resistance and unwillingness to become what the fascist state wants him to be transforms her outlook, and Gabriell himself would go to exile knowing that he is not alone. A day is enough. After finishing up the nightly chores of cleaning up the kitchen, Emmanuelle, Antoniette’s husband, asks her to come to bed as quickly as possible, indicating the possibility that he has a seventh child on his mind and more tax credits from the State. That is his parochial view and use of a woman, his wife. But Antonietta doesn’t react; she merely nods. She takes her time to complete the chores and sits by the window through which she glimpsed Gabrielle’s apartment for the first time that morning. She watches the lights go out one by one in his apartment, and she follows Gabrielle, who is escorted out of the building by the Secret Service. In her hand, she holds “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a book that Gabrielle gave her from his collection.

Only a few times in my journey as a cinema buff, have I experienced such aesthetic fulfillment after watching a movie. The work was just perfect in every sense: screenplay, direction, acting, music, photography, and the overall composition of the film; nothing I could think of could have made it better. This was a cinematic experience at its best. Moving, touching, and, at the same time, uplifting. A Special Day won a César Award ( the equivalent of the Academy Awards in France) for Best Foreign Film and was nominated for the Golden Palm at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. Marcello’s performance as the troubled and tortured intellectual and Sophia Loren’s performance as a drab housewife who discovers her vitality in a brief encounter with a stranger are both high watermarks in their respective careers.

Ettore Scola once said: “From childhood, history was a subject that fascinated me, and what I kept wondering was how everyday life might have been different if Caesar or Mussolini had changed course. My sympathy always went to those millions who didn’t participate in those choices but had to follow them.”  During his prodigious career, Scola is credited with 87 screenplays, both his own films and those of other directors. He made 42 short films and features, but among all of them, A Special Day remains his most acclaimed work. Film critics unanimously agree that in this film, Scola achieved something that directors often dream of, that is, transforming a simple story into an allegorical tale of immense significance – that the human spirit can dig into itself and prevail even under a censorious and totalitarian regime is timeless; and even today, in 2023, fifty years after this film was made, this message resonates with equal power, relevance, and vitality. That is why “A Special Day” is a special movie in the annals of cinema.

Please watch the movie when you get a chance.